*Yawn!* Wake me up when they stop requiring phone numbers to sign up.

They incorrectly broke it because they were overzealous.

There was some scare in lemmy development circles recently about script injection vulnerabilities. The various apps and frontend developers “solved” the problem by peppering untrusted user input with escape sequences all over the place. User submits post? Escape title! Receive new post from a federated instance? Escape title!

Obviously if you escape the title twice and display once, it will show up weird. The problem is that the various devs haven’t agreed yet which parts of the messaging protocol are supposed to be already escaped and which are not. Ideally all user input should be stored and transmitted in raw form, and only escaped right before displaying. But due to various zealously-cautious devs we get this instead:

Central Park is not New York’s largest park. It’s the 5th.

I think it’s precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don’t do it right then and there, no one else can.

Magic Carpet was incredibly fascinating. A whole planet that you could explore and influence and even modify terrain on? Every kid’s dream, even given proof by Minecraft’s popularity 20 years later. Could never get past the first several levels though.

Finished the game recently after giving it another go, no wonder only the beginning is kid-friendly. The later levels are devilish puzzles in difficulty. If you do not figure out the exact sequence of actions necessary to solve them, you die! Their open-world nature is only a masquerade to trick you into complacency.

The Expanse is not a realistic show. I like hard sci-fi, keep hearing the Expanse is ultra-realistic (no ftl, no anti-grav), so I open up a random clip to check it out and what’s the very first thing I see? A guy in a spacesuit standing on a catwalk outside a spaceship under main engine power. Ok, constant 1G acceleration from a magic engine, so far so good… That’s what sci-fi is supposed to be: change one magic thing and one thing only and show the consequences! But then the guy starts space-welding something, and the torch is creating puffs of smoke that effortlessly FLOAT UPWARDS. Whaaat? Ok, I’d understand if the show has to stay within a reasonable budget and can’t afford to film inside a vacuum chamber, but the fucking puffs are already CGI! The lazy no-physics-education artist has failed to seize the one opportunity to show something exotic about living in space: to animate the puffs spreading outward without impedance while falling to the ground.

I’m glad I didn’t watch the show. If I had seen this clip of the guy zooming along from moon to moon in seconds while leaning into the gravity-assist turns, I would have had an aneurysm.